


The Riddle

by AxeMeAboutAxinomancy



Category: Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Podfic Available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-12
Updated: 2013-06-12
Packaged: 2017-12-14 16:38:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/839048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AxeMeAboutAxinomancy/pseuds/AxeMeAboutAxinomancy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A child took John Watson's life away, and an old man gave it back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Podfic available](http://archiveofourown.org/works/950631), read by the author.

It had started as rather a nice day. He could remember having thought so. Decent weather. Didn't have to wait for the shower. Plenty of milk for the tea.  
  
Sherlock had been in a good mood; when John put the morning news on the telly, Sherlock knew at once that the breaking story would prompt a call from Lestrade, and while they waited for that, Sherlock deduced the whole case, pointing out things - and specific people - on the screen to John while John marvelled. It wasn't something new to John anymore, but Sherlock was no less amazing than ever in that he could glance at a still image or even a heaving crowd of people on video and see the tiny details that made all the difference.  
  
By the time Lestrade did call, and Sherlock answered his phone languidly spelling out the solution without so much as _hello_ or _goodbye_ for bookends, John could only grin fondly to himself. Sherlock was like a magician, and not the illusionist sort - a real one, who could perform real wonders in the real world. And when he hung up on Lestrade, it was John that Sherlock looked to, with that little grin that got bigger when he saw John's approval.  
  
It really was a good day, all things considered.  
  
And then things had to go and get _awkward._  
  
The initial disagreement itself was not so bad. Sherlock's cavalier attitude towards who owned what was always a low level irritant, though in this case there were acid burns on John's laptop. Why couldn't there be acid burns on _Sherlock's_ laptop?  
  
Oh, because Sherlock was using his own laptop to record the data. And John was only just launching a really satisfyingly shouty end to the matter when Mrs Hudson had to come in and refer to what they were doing, the entirely understandable argument they were having, as a _little domestic._ And she hoped there wasn't _trouble in paradise._  
  
And Sherlock had just pouted and picked up his violin and Mrs Hudson had looked obscurely pleased with herself and gone back down to her flat.  
  
"We're not - " John, fruitlessly sputtering down the stairwell after her, "it isn't!" Banging the door shut he turned on Sherlock, who stood holding the violin like a prop, clearly with no intention of playing it.  
  
"Why can't you ever say anything?"  
  
"Why should I?"  
  
At least he wasn't pretending he didn't know what John was talking about.  
  
"Because it's not true!" They were not a couple! Everyone assumed it but they _weren't._  
  
"What's not? We _were_ having a little domestic. Or _you_ were, at least. You were shouting loud enough to bring Mrs Hudson up the stairs. It's no wonder she'd think there was - trouble in paradise." Was he quoting? He wasn't even quoting!  
  
"For Christ's sake! THIS IS NOT PARADISE!"  
  
He'd remember saying that, later.  
  
John snatched his coat off the peg and barrelled off outside without a backward look.  
  
He'd remember that, too.  
  
He did as he always did when he was angry, walked and walked, at first with short jerky steps, but his stride lengthened bit by bit as he went. Because it was not the weekend, Camden was actually sort of nice. Still swarming with tourists, but at least there wasn't a market going on. And the sun was actually shining. There was a busker with a French horn, of all things, its clear mellow sound so different to the voice of the violin.  
  
The last coherent thoughts of his old life, as he walked along the towpath for the Regent's Canal, were of Sherlock.  
  
He was just thinking that he'd been too angry about the laptop and that Sherlock hadn't really said anything wrong at all - even his not-saying-anything to Mrs Hudson could have been construed as 'not dignifying it with an answer'. And the violin, had he picked it up to hurry her away again? John had actually scolded him for taking the high road! When it was generally such a struggle to get Sherlock to see that a high road even existed.  
  
What time was it? He was getting hungry. He'd been walking a while now. Maybe he should go back.  
  
He was getting his mobile out of his pocket to check the time  
  
when suddenly  
  
a little girl in a white dress  
  
ran close by him.  
  
She jostled his arm just a bit as she did, and it triggered a jolt of protect-against-pickpockets in John, as it would in anyone accustomed to life in a big city. But he could feel his wallet still there, and his phone was in his hand, he was just checking the time.  
  
The girl, sprinting, barefoot, was in a sort of frilly smock that John instantly connected with the people who worked in costumes at the weekend markets, but again: not the weekend. It didn't seem to cover her properly. Was it torn? Had she been attacked?  
  
She glanced back, once, over her shoulder.  
  
She was just a little thing, six-maybe-seven; but the look on her face was ages old. Her hair was dark, short, ruthlessly straight fringe across her forehead as though it were just cut that morning. Dark eyes. And smudges of dirt on her face and arms. The soles of her little feet as she ran were black with grime.  
  
That was all he had time to see before the man following her shouldered him aside and John only just avoided being knocked into the water.  
  
As he clutched at the bike barrier, balance teetering back into his control, heart pounding with angry adrenaline, John swore, with feeling, as his phone squirted out of his grip and landed _plunk!_ in the canal.  
  
 _"Shit!"_  
  
And John followed after them. Of course he did. "Hey!" he shouted, and tore off after the man in black, who ran after the girl in white, who ran on ahead into the light-dappled darkness of one of the tunnels along the path.  
  
The man called out to the girl. "W-w-wait - ! "  
  
The girl did not answer or slow her flight.  
  
And then things got - confusing.  
  
It was just a short tunnel that passed under the building above. You could see the other side of it, as you approached it. The towpath and the rail continued on through it.  
  
But once he ran into it, the sunlight ahead was gone. The tunnel was longer on the inside. And darker. The only thing John's eye could make out was the white of the girl's dress, turning a corner.  
  
Corner?  
  
Where was the rail? The towpath rail?  
  
Where was the fucking _canal?_  
  
There was a rush of air that he could feel against the left side of his face, but he couldn't hear the water.  
  
Someone spoke. It was the girl. She was right there beside him. She said,  
  
"He never gets in here."  
  
"Are you okay? Did he hurt you? Who is he? Why is he chasing you?"  
  
"He just wants to catch me. Won't, though."  
  
She pulled at John's sleeve, tugging him down as though for a secret, and then she kissed him on the cheek. He scarcely felt it.  
  
"Sorry," she said, and letting go, ran away again into darkness.  
  
John staggered out of the tunnel again into blinding daylight. He stopped in the middle of the towpath and turned round to stare. Ordinary tunnel. Graffiti.  
  
Suddenly, a git on a bicycle shot out of the tunnel, almost knocking him down, swearing at John before pedalling off. And no sign, on the other side, on either side, no sign at all of the fleeing girl or of the stammering man.  
  
***  
It took John almost a whole day to understand that something was very wrong. With his life. With the world. With - everything.  
  
It didn't surprise him very much that when he tried to tell a couple of cops in the park about the girl, they didn't pay any attention. And John had to admit, he didn't _know_ that the man chasing her wasn't her dad. He had only been able to say that the man had been chasing the girl, and that she'd only said he wanted to catch her.  
  
He couldn't call or text Sherlock of course, with his phone making itself comfortable at the bottom of the canal - and God damn but the thing was practically new and hadn't been cheap!  
  
He'd been about to walk home anyway, so walk home he did. He was so unsettled by the weird encounter that he kept getting in people's way somehow. Like he'd lost his crowd rhythm and was trying to swim against the current. More curses. He got sick of apologising, so he stopped.  
  
He thought that a bit of wine might be good this evening. But when he tried to buy some, his card was declined. All John could think was, Sherlock had wrung it out ordering things for his experiments. He sighed a long-suffering sigh and turned away without wine.  
  
When he got in to 221, Mrs Hudson ignored the greeting he called through, although he could hear her moving about in the kitchen. Probably annoyed with him about the shouting earlier. Shrugging, John went up to B. Sherlock was not home.  
  
John made tea and toast and tried to watch telly but the remote stopped working, despite a change of batteries. He had to change channels on the set itself, like in the old days, but unlike in the old days, the sleek LCD set had black buttons way down on one side of its black casing, unhelpfully labeled in black-on-black bas relief, and he kept turning the power on and off by accident. After three or four goes around of this he gave it up and left it off.  
  
The flat felt strange - well, Sherlock was not in it, that was an emptiness, but this was - something else. It had always felt like the most welcoming place John had ever lived, from the very first day he sat down in his chair - from the first, he knew instinctively which was _his chair_ \- but today it felt _awkward,_ as though he were a stranger in the familiar space. The flat watched him, polite but unwelcoming, as he moved around in it.  
  
 John was unsettled and irritated and in the end he went up to bed ridiculously early just to get the day over with. Today had been crap and very confusing and tomorrow could only be better.  
  
It wasn't, though.  
  
Even his own bedroom felt sterile, empty of connection, like someone else's guest room. It was unnerving.  
  
His dreams, though not the familiar warscapes, were oppressive. In one it was John himself that got knocked into the canal, while his phone stayed nice and dry on the path; and though it seemed to take ages of falling before he actually hit the surface,  instead of water he found himself caged in a bubble of glass and wondering vaguely how it was that he could breathe. In another Sherlock had the bag of spraypaint cans that earned John his ASBO, and was rummaging through it trying out the different colours on the wall, but Mrs Hudson was on her way up the stairs and John was about to get in trouble for it all over again.  
  
John woke with heart racing, feeling not at all rested. He dragged himself upright, glanced out the window. Grey and damp, with no trace of yesterday's sunshine.  
  
He couldn't get any hot water that morning, and Mrs Hudson didn't answer her door. John gritted his teeth and took a brutally cold shower, trying to psychically connect with his former self in Afghanistan, the John who had sweltered in the heat and wished again and again for cool water to shower in. _I'd settle for ice cold,_ that hot and miserable and, above all, homesick John had thought. _I'd stand there in a cold shower shivering my bollocks off and like it just fine,_ he'd thought.  
  
It didn't help at all in the here and now. It was just annoying, actually. He hadn't even meant it then, he'd only longed to be cool and clean and free of sand.  
  
Sherlock was back, John could hear him muttering out there.  
  
John emerged from the bathroom in his dressing gown, shivering but clean, face smarting from the cold razor.  
  
"There's no hot water again," he called into the sitting room, where he could see Sherlock hunched over like a vulture and glaring at a computer.  
  
Sherlock ignored him. This was not at all surprising. Such trivial matters were of no interest to Sherlock, or wouldn't be until _he_ required hot water for his experiments, or for his own lengthy shower, fragrant with expensive products. He would care _then._ So John shrugged, and went upstairs to dress.  
  
When he came back down, he found Sherlock petulantly prowling the bookshelves, pulling books down seemingly at random to add to one precariously towering stack on the desk.  
  
"What are you doing now," exasperated. The books had only just all been put away at last after the cipher case, which had been months and months ago. John had got tired of the precarious bookscape and enforced its clearing-out. Now it appeared to be forming anew.  
  
No response.  
  
"That pile's going to tip over."  
  
No response. Another book shoved onto the pile, which did not - yet - tip over.  
  
"Sherlock."  
  
Sherlock wasn't listening at all, didn't appear to have registered John's presence. John huffed in annoyance. He hated to be ignored.  
  
"Sherlock!"  
  
He had drifted closer, but now when Sherlock turned around with another book clutched in his long white fingers - John could see that Sherlock was going to just run right into him without noticing until it was too late, and so he jerked back out of Sherlock's way, elbow nudging the book pile in the process and bringing it down like a tumbling-tower game.  
  
Sherlock hissed with annoyance and started stacking them up again. He did not look up at John, or speak to him, and most strangely, he did not accuse John of knocking the books down, though it had been John's fault. Not even a _Really, John._ Just looked right through him.  
  
"SHERLOCK." He bellowed, uncaring of Mrs Hudson's assumptions. "DAMMIT. SHERLOCK! ANSWER ME!!"  
  
If nothing else, the volume of this last shout almost into his face ought to have made Sherlock physically flinch back. But it didn't.  
  
John started to feel a creeping cold down the back of his neck. What... was... this? Sherlock ignoring John, or in a snit and not speaking to John - John had seen both of these things, and they did not look like this. There was something - not natural about this.  
  
Blank-eyed, Sherlock started to walk around John to the desk.  
  
John reached up and grasped his arm, giving it a little shake. "Sherlock!" He wasn't shouting anymore, but his heart was beating very fast. "What is _wrong_ with you?!"  
  
For just a moment, as Sherlock's pale eyes slid towards John and focussed on his face, John felt such a surge of happy relief, because it was nothing after all, it was fine, it was all fine, Sherlock was merely super-focussed on whatever the books were for and everything was -  
  
Sherlock twitched back, dislodging John's hand, and stared down at him with frost-beams for eyes.  
  
"Did Mrs Hudson send you up here?"  
  
"What...?"  
  
"I am not taking any clients at this time," words like ice cubes rattling in an empty glass.  
  
 _"What?_ I'm - not -" John couldn't seem to take in enough air. What was this? "Sherlock it's _me!"_  
  
"Leave. The door is there, if you've forgotten already," said this stranger-Sherlock, and turned away dismissively, to resume his bookcase operations.  
  
John stood there. Pinned to the spot, as though he were being continuously struck by lightning. What - ? _How - ?_  
  
...Oh.  
  
 _You... deleted me?_  
  
There was a roaring in his ears, he felt the strength draining out of him. His fingers were tingling. Jesus. Was he going to faint?  
  
 _You **deleted** me!_  
  
John clenched his fists. No. He was _not_ going to faint.  
  
He'd always dreaded this. This day. The day Sherlock would dismiss John, delete all memory of him, make room for something or someone else to take up the space in the flat, in his Palace. And John would have to go back to his meaningless, pre-Sherlock existence and he would never, _never_ -  
  
Where did the deleted memories go? Wherever that was, it was where John was now. Sherlock's oubliette.  
  
When Sherlock placed another book on the pile, John had to grab his arm again to make Sherlock look at him. Sherlock paused, looking at him, frowning, vague. Puzzled.  
  
"You shouldn't have done it," John said. _"Sherlock._ You - I thought we were _friends."_  
  
 _More than friends. More than brothers. How could you forget me. How could you take back - every single minute - and not even know!_  
  
A long moment passed before Sherlock opened his mouth. And then he said,  
  
"Did Mrs Hudson send you up here...?"  
  



	2. Chapter 2

John ran down to Mrs Hudson's flat, pounded on her door. No response, but this time he wasn't taking that for an answer. He kicked the door in.

She was sitting at her kitchen table. She took no notice of the violent entry, or of John standing in her doorway, panting and wild-eyed. She was writing something on a pad of paper. Christmas list. Already? John had no idea she started so early in the year.

"Mrs Hudson...?"

And this was when John discovered that it wasn't just Sherlock who did not know who John was. Somehow, _Mrs Hudson_ had deleted him too. She took no notice of him at all until he touched her shoulder, and then she slowly focussed and gave him her pleasant, vague stranger-smile.

"Oh hello," she said, "I'm sorry, I didn't hear you come in. Are you here about the downstairs flat? Only it's a bit damp, what with all the rain last week..." And she got up and reached for the keys to 221C, hanging on a hook by the door.

He stared at her.

Then he turned and ran outside and stood on the pavement looking wildly around him. He had to dodge out of people's way. No one looked at him, no one spoke to him.

"Um - "

"Wait -"

"Hello!"

_"Hey!"_

"FOR GOD'S SAKE - CAN'T ANYONE SEE ME??"

They couldn't.

John could only get people to interact with him by grabbing and shaking them, and they forgot him immediately after. He tested this with several people, and the pattern of slow focus, vague assumptions about who he was, and then forgetting and starting over again verbatim, quickly became depressingly familiar.

He could even push the envelope, sort of like 'Groundhog Day': actually pick a fight with someone, and then start over moments later with the very same person. They didn't remember that just thirty seconds ago they'd been shouting at him to take back what he'd said about their mother. (Quite apart from the randomness of his attack no stranger has ever liked being shouted at, and 'bit of a slapper' of course is insulting to anybody's mum.)

What was _wrong_ with everyone? With Sherlock and Mrs Hudson and _everyone_...?

At last, tired out, panting on a bench, John thought:

Never mind everyone. What was wrong with _him_?

John could think of no explanation that wasn't madness. Hallucination. But it persisted. Even from inside a delusion he needed to try to reason it out. The only things he could think of were from movies, absurd ideas. Hallucination ideas.

Was he - dead?, a ghost? Was he _Bruce Willis?_ No, he was alive. He was absolutely alive. He was tired, and sweaty, and starving now, and he had a pulse and of course he wasn't a sodding _ghost_.

Was he, maybe, _Jimmy Stewart?_ Mrs Hudson and her Christmas list. John did not recall wishing he'd never been born. Not for almost a year now. And of course there weren't any sodding _guardian angels._

These were frivolous thoughts. Waste of energy. He didn't understand what had happened to him. He didn't know what to do. He slumped down on the bench with his head in his hands.

 _Think. Ask the questions you would ask anybody with a strange problem. Or any problem._ The questions that John would step in with when a potential client was rambling too much and Sherlock was getting bored. The questions that would help organise the blog entry that the case might become. _Basic_ questions.

Basic question #1. When did it start?

_Yesterday._

Basic question #2. Where did it start?

_By the canal._

Basic question #3. Who was there?

John lifted his head up, staring at nothing.

_The girl._

***

He needed to eat. On the way he grabbed a Scotch egg from a food stall, leaving money on the counter. He knew he didn't have to pay. No one would have noticed if he had taken a whole tray of eggs and stood right there eating them one by one.

But he only needed one. He ate it as he walked. It was delicious.

He felt much better, though the walk seemed longer today without the propulsion of anger.

His heart pounded as he approached the tunnel, but when he walked in, nothing unexpected happened at all. It was an ordinary canal tunnel on the inside. John thought he recognised Raz's work amongst the graffiti. But then, he'd seen it in many places by now.

He walked all the way through to the other side, stopped, looked forward, looked back.

Everything normal. And no sign of the girl, or her pursuer, whom John had not really seen except from the back. He was - about John's height, wasn't he? No, a bit taller - And he'd called out to the girl to wait.

John turned round, avoiding bicycles, and walked back through the tunnel again, more slowly. Still nothing happened.

He sat and stood and prowled and paced for hours. There was no sign of anyone out of the ordinary - people walking, people cycling, people taking pictures.

When he saw some of these last, he tried interacting with them. Someone might have been here yesterday and have seen her. She had been unusual. He even tried some of the hopeful anglers that were always there, trying to catch god knew what in the dirty water. Over and over he shook someone into seeing and hearing him, but no one had seen or heard her...

Or... Had they? Was the girl - invisible in the same way John seemed to have become? Had they just not noticed her at all as she ran by?

But why had John seen her then?

_She brushed by me. And the man hit me with his shoulder._

That didn't explain anything.

_And my mobile got knocked into the water._

John went back to the barriers, approached the bank of the canal and looked down into the water, though he knew surely the thing had been swept down the stream and had ended in a drain somewhere. And even if it hadn't, the water had already ruined it. Or maybe it had been eaten by one of the swans -

In his reflection, he saw

the girl

standing beside him

on the bank.

Gasping, he spun -

She was _not_ there.

He was all alone.

Now John's heart was pounding very fast and it was, it was definitely a bit, in fear. Instinctive fear, of things seen that _should not be_ there. Slowly, slowly, he turned his head and looked down at the water again.

She was there. Quite close beside him.

He was _not_ alone.

His skin was crawling as though it wanted _off_.

She met his eyes in the reflection; her little face, still dirty, was solemn and calm. She nodded once, then turned and walked away along the path, towards Eyre's tunnel.

His steps were slow and unwilling at first, but - this was nothing more nor less than what he'd come back here for. To find that girl. To find out what happened to him and his life. To get that life back.

Because if Sherlock had not deleted him, then John would move heaven and earth to get that life back.

He followed her to the tunnel and stopped again. He thought she was going to lead him in, and he was bracing himself for that, but she did not. She thrust out her skinny bare arm and pointed up at the tree beside the tunnel, and he looked at it - the real tree, not the reflection.

When he looked back at the water he got another shock. She was pointing again, this time down at the water, but she didn't need to this time. He saw.

The surface of the water was very still. Still as glass, still as a freeze frame of film, caught between moments.

The mouth of the tunnel was reflected below in that still water, perfect mirror image fitting one half to the other, so that it was no longer a tunnel or a reflection or a reflection of a tunnel.

It was a _hole in the ground._

Not an abyss, or a well, not an optical illusion but - a hole in the ground. When he leaned forward (gripping the rail, mouth hanging open) he could see the bottom of it, perfectly dry, and a shadowed way leading into a tunnel of its own, leading off diagonally and then - turning a corner.

A corner, from round which the girl was now peeking back at him. When she saw John looking she nodded again.

Then she was gone.

And John didn't stand there dithering. He had to follow. What else was he to do? As he climbed over the rail and dropped down, he tried very hard not to consider how in the world he was to get out again.

There was no trace of dampness from the canal - which was a good thing, he thought sourly as he rose from his knees, because the water would fill this space up quickly and completely - if it could. It hadn't, anyway. And when John turned to look back from the corner, the hole was gone, and the tunnel he had just walked up was dark.

He turned the corner and walked on.

He never needed to ask himself, What is this place? Because it was obvious. It was still _London_. It was more of London, underneath London; parts of London he'd never seen, nor guessed existed.

And it wasn't all underground.

He could have sworn he'd been walking down, but suddenly John found himself under open sky. At night. It had been afternoon just - moments ago. Hadn't it?

He felt as though he had been transported into some old movie set or fun park or other basically fake place put to a different use. It was also a bit like Camden Market, except in the middle of the night, during a pagan/pirate festival/goth convention - And things were on fire. A wild pack of dancing boys with torches were responsible, screams following in their wake. The place was as crowded as Camden Market, yes, but... there was only one tourist. And that tourist was John.

He closed his jacket over his black-and-white jumper (the white stripes were unsettlingly vivid in the torchlight) and tried to look for the girl - but she might have been anywhere in this maze of ramshackle buildings and piles of unhoused furniture and the crowd of mostly dirty people in an assortment of ragtag costumes that seemed to have been scavenged from a collision between costume trucks on their way to a landfill.

There were rats everywhere. And hints of other animals, skulking, their eyes like blank lenses mirroring light. Not to mention, he was attracting the interest of two-legged predators. John's fingers twitched. He wished for his gun. Not for the last time.

He'd just have to do without it.

The next hours were bad.

There was certainly danger enough for him here, more than enough to fulfill the most constant craving. But he was alone. There was no more home base. He had to do the running and fighting and hiding all by himself, and so there wasn't any rest, or any laughing.

_Sherlock._

The pang of grief that swept over John was almost incapacitating. The sight of Sherlock's face as John had never had to see it - dismissive of a boring stranger, 'no further analysis'. John had never had to see that directed at _him_ before, though he saw it so often directed at others. In John's life before, from the first moment, Sherlock had looked up and noticed him and started asking him impressive questions.

Looked up and _noticed_ John. And just like that they were a pair, almost effortless (give or take a shooting, or a cringingly awkward scene in a restaurant) - laughing together. They were like kings, so rich in time they could afford to waste it.

He stayed on the move, didn't try to ask questions. Anything meeker than himself was too afraid of him to approach, and anything obviously stronger was more than he wanted to potentially take on, without a weapon, without a partner.

Soon enough he was running.

He was being chased by a group of shouting armoured men (and one shrill-voiced woman) that he had offended by knocking one of their number (the woman) down. He hadn't meant to, but there was no opportunity to explain that to a group too large to handle.

Chases with Sherlock had taught him a lot of tricks, though some of them had to be adapted to this new London - which looked, come to think of it, like an extremely old London. Once he'd got rid of them (they were a real threat at close quarters, but the armour made them pitifully slow) John started to circle round back to where he started. He would have to risk asking questions, and marking himself out even more as a newcomer. But he could think of no other way to look for the girl in white.

She might not have been able to tell him anything if he did find her. But there had been one thing she had said, yesterday, that had slid away from the front of his mind. It had been buried among the strangeness of his senses once he ran into the tunnel. She had kissed his cheek, and then she had said _Sorry_.

Why should she have said Sorry? What did she think she had done to John? What indeed, if not making him invisible (he still flinched from calling it that explicitly in his mind, but that was what it amounted to and there was no sensible way to describe it), stealing his life, and leading him here?

He was tired, and hungry, and heartsore, his feet and fists aching, and when the thing with the stinger came up from behind him he was slow to understand what he was looking at. It was too bizarre to be real, but the way it came at him was real enough for his survival instincts. He bashed a rock into what he had to assume was its face, but he got slashed across the back of his hand by the stinger as he did.

Just a superficial wound, a little line drawn with a hot needle that turned into cold fire, that went sweeping up his arm.

The next hour was _very_ bad.

He staggered away from the - thing - which was still twitching, but not in a way he could be bothered to worry about. He was sweating in the cold. His heartbeat, his vision, his balance were affected.

Venom, he thought. Neurotoxin.

Just what he needed.

So tired.

He was stumbling like a drunk. He rubbed his face with his left hand - his right hung down at his side, throbbing. Electrical jolts of pain shot up from it randomly, intense enough to bring tears into his eyes. His mouth felt numb. He was dizzy...

Something was near him again. No, someone. A person, hopefully. They grasped his arm and he jerked back with a hoarse scream at the pain of it. Roaring in ears. Hard to breathe. Deal with threat. Survive. Retreat.

He stepped back over nothing and fell down. When he struck the ground it drove the little remaining breath from his lungs and he blacked out.

He didn't wake up all at once. Moments of lucidity came in like oblique shafts of light through blinds. He was moving... smoothly, sort of; rolling along somehow, on some sort of a bridge, and he looked up at a sky whose stars looked strange in a way he couldn't define before his head lolled to the side again.

In the next one, he seemed to be underground. Endless, endless stone corridor with lamps that stank of fishy oil. Hideous bumping down too many stairs. Oh God his arm. Just a scratch on his hand and his whole fucking arm wanted off.

Another canal? The water was so dark. A river of ink underground.

A boat. He could see little of it, and what little he saw made little sense. It was a structure floating on water, in any case.

A cracked old voice was saying, " - in a moment."

John lay there sweating, and vaguely wondered if he was going to be able to defend himself from whatever happened _in a moment._ He'd seen enough already to imagine he might have some value per pound as a foodstuff.

But he was so tired. The hideous pain in his arm was the only thing keeping him from complete unconsciousness. It was getting harder, not easier, to breathe. Distantly, he knew that was bad. But it didn't matter...

The old man came back from the boat and showed what looked like a shotglass full of water to John. John gazed uncomprehendingly from it to the person holding it - of whom he could see almost nothing. Grizzled hair trailed from under a sort of turban, and all of this was swathed in a cloak. 'Extremely decrepit' was how John would have described him, if he were writing about it in his blog. If there ever was such a thing as a blog. If he ever really wrote a word...

"Antidote. Do you hear? _Antidote_. Drink it."

The type of authority John heard in the rough old voice was not that of a cajoling poisoner. It was like his own voice as a doctor when he had to be firm.

But by now, John almost didn't care if it was poison. He was that wretched. So he drank it. The old man had to hold the glass for him and tip it into his mouth.

It was a thick, clear syrup. It tasted like toast.

He coughed. His stomach clenched as if in outrage, but then relaxed as warmth started to spread out from it. He took as deep a breath as he could.

"Better?"

"I think... so," speaking slowly, making sure that it was true as he said it. "Yes. Thank you..."

He tried to focus. Was he lying in a _wheelbarrow?_

"Why... why did you help me?" Strength was returning to his voice. His mouth was tingling, but no longer numb.

"Perhaps I need a doctor. We trade favours down here."

John's stomach, so recently relaxed, clenched anew. "How do _you_ know I'm a doctor?"

The old man produced John's wallet and handed it over.

"Oh," said John. He grimaced as he put it away. Stupid.

"Didn't need that, of course," the old man said. "I'd know you anywhere."

His voice had changed at that last, and he pulled back the hood of his cloak and swept off the turban - and the grizzled hair with it. The deep laugh was so familiar and so unexpected that John felt it electrifying his spine till his hair wanted to stand on end. He _stared_.

"You can't think how glad I am to see you again, Watson," said Sherlock Holmes, smiling; "you dear old thing."

It was just as well that John _was_ lying on his back in a wheelbarrow. The universe could wobble violently around him without his having to fall down again. He ached enough. But his eyes stayed fixed on that face, that face looking at him, and he heard that voice talking to him.

"Sherlock...?" In the one word, layers of incredulous questions, _how did you get down here, how did you find me, how did you remember, what the hell is going on?_

The dark imperious brows lifted. Surprise?

"Yes," he said, and tilting his head slightly, "Are you able to stand...? You might find my rooms humble, yet still preferable to a wheelbarrow."


	3. Chapter 3

One: He _was_ Sherlock. Oh yes he was. John would - know him anywhere. When he wasn't in disguise. When John wasn't half out of his mind with venom and pain.

Two: He was not Sherlock. He was different from Sherlock while still being Sherlock. He was not - _John's_ Sherlock. John's Sherlock was still in the flat, alone now in the ordinary world, making new mountains of books.

And there was no Three, because John simply did not know what to do with what his senses were telling him. They were confused enough by the aforementioned 'rooms' when they boarded the boat and passed through the cabin door.

From the inside, the windows streamed with sunlight.

John resisted the urge to go back out and look. The space inside the boat wasn't just bigger. It was quite obviously _elsewhere_. More of a 'moving castle' than a TARDIS. No sunshine had ever reached down to touch that inky water on the other side of the door. He stood still and stared.

The windows stretched from the floor to the very high ceiling, flanked by old red drapes. And where there were not windows, there were bookcases. Where there were not bookcases, there were shelves and tables and cabinets, and covering these surfaces was a profusion of strange objects, glass globes and sextants and crystals and little clockwork machines made of riveted copper. There were some beautiful rugs on the floor, but at least one of them was a bit scorched, probably from some explosion. John knew the signs.

One completely comprehensible object was the big hulking microscope, but it was like a movie prop, some steampunk thing where old-timey machines had lots of fancy detailing (fins, figureheads, fiddlybits) and whether it was brass or gold that made it shiny yellow, it definitely had some very unnecessary jewels on it.

"What is this?" he said weakly. " _Where_ is this? And who - Oh fucking Christ Sherlock don't you _dare_ SMOKE," suddenly, reflexively shouting at the sight of Sherlock/not-Sherlock casually opening a silver case and plugging a cigarette into his mouth.

It's what John would have said at home. He didn't even have time to think. The freezing stare was familiar enough, but it went on for so long that John realised he was actually offended.

"Watson," coldly, "I observe that you were more recently a soldier than most of my acquaintance, I have certainly heard rougher language, but I am accustomed to being addressed as _Holmes_." An icy pause, then, "And. I. _Smoke_. In my _own home._ With your _kind_ permission," he lit the cigarette, and took a deep, luxurious drag off it before flinging himself into a seat not far from the microscope.

As annoyingly patrician as Sherlock had ever been, and he certainly had when it suited him, this was a whole new level beyond John's previous experience, with the possible exception of...

"You talk like Mycroft," John heard himself saying. "Theatrical posh. Who are you - Holmes? What _is_ this." He gestured round in an inclusive way. "My life has fallen apart and no one can see me or remember me _not even him_ and now I'm - here, so - tell me if you know, what the hell _is_ all this?"

"'All this' is called by its denizens 'London Below'," said Holmes. "It is an underworld, of sorts, for the living. A counterpart to the London Above that you know. They are divided by magic."

John laughed.

Up went the eyebrows again, but this time Holmes did not look affronted. He sat up straighter, intrigued now. For the first time, John noticed a significant difference between Holmes and Sherlock. Holmes had grey in his hair: the sunlight showed it. Yet his face looked no older than the one John knew so well.

"You're amused, Watson? By magic? You do not believe? Do tell me what force _you_ think has caused your life to 'fall apart', and did you not come Below via the hole in Eyre's tunnel? How did that work, pray?"

"How did you - "

"The particular type of soil embedded in the knees of your trousers. As well, the area I found you in... though I admit, you travelled farther and faster than I might have guessed. You... your counterpart used a cane, I thought you would also."

"My counterpart..."

"Yes, as the Sherlock Holmes that you have known is _my_ counterpart. We are the same, to a point - very much the same, but from different worlds."

John wanted to repeat the confusing words again: _different worlds_ \- and demand to know what this meant - but didn't get the opportunity. A different question leapt out of his mouth.

"Where is my counterpart, then?"

But he knew the answer before he'd quite finished speaking. Even though this Holmes was a stranger - who argued about magic - and spoke seriously of different worlds - his face was just the same. And John knew what averting the eyes towards the left meant, when Sherlock did it. It was as though that was the place in his Mind Palace where he kept the things he really didn't want.

"He died," said Holmes, his pale eyes flat and focussed elsewhere, his voice pitched low.

"Oh," said John.

"It was my fault," Holmes said. He had lifted his cigarette almost to his lips and appeared to be speaking to it.

"Was it?"

"Yes." Eyes the colours of rain and ice flicked up to meet John's, and John felt it almost like a physical contact. Just like when Sherlock did it. "An ill-advised experiment that... went wrong."

"I see," said John, because it seemed wildly inappropriate to say 'I'm sorry'.

An embarrassed moment limped by. John cleared his throat.

"How do I go home, then? If I'm divided, by magic, then, from _my_ Sherlock, how do I fix it?"

"I do not know," Holmes said. "I do not know if it can be fixed. But I will try to help you if I can."

Into the following silence, the sound of a growling stomach obtruded. John shifted in embarrassment.

"But my manners, Watson. Do take off your coat and sit down. I imagine you could long since do with tea."

_"I'm_ accustomed to being addressed as 'John'," he said as he unfastened and pulled off his coat.

Holmes was pouring water from a jug into a teapot. "Given names are rather... intimate, are they not?"

"What is that supposed to mean?" Familiar prickle of annoyance. Must _everyone...?_ "And aren't you supposed to boil the water first?"

Holmes turned to face him, opening his mouth to answer... but before he could, he stopped short, staring wide-eyed at John, lips quirking.

"What?"

"I... Nothing, forgive me, nothing."

"Seriously, what the hell. What's funny?"

"Seriously, then, Watson: your clothing. Your face - looks odd enough without the moustache, absurdly young - but then - that - " pointing, apparently, at John's chest. John looked down at his black and white stripes, then back up.

"This is my _favourite jumper,_ " jaw set in stubborn mode. Moustache? Seriously?

"You look like a _cabin boy."_ And now Holmes was laughing, and though he was laughing at John, still, it was exactly the same laughter John had been mourning the loss of. He relaxed, fractionally, and then smiled.

"A girl I dated once said it made me look like a burglar."

And then they were both laughing, and for just a moment John felt like he was home.

That didn't last long, though.

There was so much magic in this place that John soon had no choice but to accept its existence. It would have been like denying the existence of electricity in the control room of a power station.

For example, the tea, whose water was never boiled, was nonetheless steaming-hot as Holmes poured it out into the cups. For another, the amount Holmes smoked _should_ have made him and the rooms and everything in them reek horribly of it, but there was no such smell; and even while he was smoking, the smoke itself never drifted into John's face, and the cigarette butts seemed to vanish when Holmes was done with them.

Those were little things, the things John noticed first. There were bigger things.

There were the rooms themselves, so mismatched to the boat on the other side of the door. Even an attempt to explain that scientifically would be indistinguishable from magic. Interdimensional gateway? Teleportation? Honestly, it was just easier to wrap one's mind around 'magic door' and just cope with it. Because it was amazing. And John had learned to cope with amazing.

Food appeared. Literally. Food _appeared_. John felt savagely hungry and did not trouble himself overmuch with table manners. Holmes already made him feel inclined to rougher speech, just in self-defense, to balance against the plummy accent and curious old-fashioned turns of phrase. Holmes said _pray_ instead of _please_ (considerably more often than Sherlock ever said _please_ ). And he rarely used contractions.

The sunlight through the windows gave way to dusk. John, exhausted, sat back in his chair - that is, the chair he was sitting in - he didn't live here - he didn't have a chair - he was just here in it - and as he thought these things, he dozed off.

An unknown time later, he half-woke to the sensation of someone tugging off his shoe. That was nice. His feet ached. It would be _really_ nice if - yes, the other one. He opened his eyes and saw the top of - of Holmes' head as he knelt down in front of John, unlacing and then pulling off the second shoe. John's eyes blinked once, then drifted shut again.

The next touch made him flinch. But it was only a blanket.

And John Watson fell asleep, as he had done more than once in the past, to the sound of a violin.

***

John opened his eyes to the pink-streaked grey of early dawn. His eyes swept up to the top of the tall windows. Took in the curtains. Flicked over to the shelves crammed with books and bell jars and Stirling engines. He remembered where he was, but he looked carefully at the details to make sure they were what he remembered from yesterday. In dreams, things changed. Details changed. But whatever he was dreaming about just now, he couldn't remember. Now he was awake, and this place persisted in seeming real.

He turned his head and saw Sherlock -

_no -_

Holmes, stretched out on the sofa, on his back, asleep.

John looked at him.

Asleep, and with his grey-shot curls in shadow so that they looked uniformly dark, he looked so perfectly like Sherlock that John had to look away. But not for long. He looked again.

Holmes had clearly fallen asleep with his hands pressed together in that familiar gesture; they had ended up in a loose sloppy clasp under his chin, fingers curled together. His hair, which had been severely swept back, had wandered partly into his face, and his mouth was open. Eyelashes like dark smudges against his cheeks. The top buttons of his (painfully white) shirt were unfastened and his throat -

But why would John be looking at that.

Holmes' shoes were off, lined up neatly on the floor beside the sofa. John glanced down and saw his own shoes in similar case. He looked down at the blanket over him.

Quietly he laid it aside and got up. He discovered, marvelled at and then made use of the old-fashioned water closet. Then he looked around a bit, as quietly as possible. If Holmes was anything like Sherlock, and he obviously was, then hours of sleep were both few and far between and he was best left to them as long as possible.

_Sherlock. There's got to be some way back. A way home. I'll find it._

John went to a window and looked out. It wasn't a ship at all, inside the boat on the underground canal. It seemed to be a normal house (a normal house, that is, with a _magic door)_ with a garden that sloped down a hill toward some running water John could faintly hear, a stream or brook beyond the screening trees.

Many of the book spines were completely incomprehensible. John could usually guess at least what language something was in from the look of it, even if he couldn't read it, but not these.

More fascinating, though, or at least more of a draw to the casual eye, were the things everywhere, the curious objects. Some things were grouped together - a bunch of what looked like little sundials, another of compasses - but most things were either in groups too obscure for John to identify, or else truly random.

There was a whole shelf of animal figurines in a rough sort of dark wood - John would have thought them part of some sort of Noah's Ark, but they seemed a bit Lovecraftian for any sane Noah to have wanted to rescue. There was another grouping, in a cabinet, of crystals of various types and sizes. The doors were open, and John leaned close (with his hands self-consciously clasped behind his back, lest he break something, lest he seem to be keen on stealing - a boy's guilt in a sweet shop). There were knives and other tools. There were scopes and goggles and clocks.

There were rough crystals, and globe crystals, none of these on the sort of pedestals that John would expect with a 'crystal ball'. Instead they were sitting on bits of stone or little pillows. Some of them were the expected spheres, but many were as imperfect as baroque pearls, among these an almost oval one that looked very fragile and precious, and had a sort of faint, faraway blue light lurking in it that at first John took for a reflection from the cabinet glass. Right beside that was a geode with beaded wires wrapped around it, and on the next shelf several small boxes had been shoved to one side to make room for a wide-based sort of urn.

"You are entirely welcome to examine things, Watson."

John startled, turned his head, his hands still virtuously clasped. Holmes chuckled as he sat up on the sofa. Ugh, was he putting another cigarette into his mouth? Yes. Yes he was. Eyes barely open, and just _ugh_.

"You seem to fear spontaneous shoplifting. Or singeing your fingers? Have no fear. Nothing especially dangerous is sitting out on the shelves. - Not mostly," he added in a quieter tone, but only because he was inhaling smoke at the time. "I would advise against winding any of the music boxes without first consulting me."

Startled, John looked back at the shelves. Did he mean the shoved-aside boxes, or were there others he should be worrying about? "Why - what could happen?"

"It rather depends upon the music box. Will you have breakfast?"

John had to think about it. He had slept for many hours, but the meal before that had been a feast, like a holiday.

"Just tea," he said.

He meant the beverage, but Holmes took him to mean the meal. Again: food _appeared_. It ought to have been unnerving, but it was so damned _convenient_. John thought again about automagical science fiction. Star Trek food replicators. How he'd longed for those to really exist back in med school.

But oh, that was nothing.

After breakfasting on a lot of sandwiches and little cakes, John had a completely normal and non-magical bath - with blessedly hot water - while his clothes, placed as directed into a covered basket, came out of it again completely clean.

There was a fresh scar on the back of John's hand from the stinging thing; he had bruises in many places. He had to shave without a mirror, but he could live with that.

While he shaved he thought about the other Watson. The other John. Who died. And Holmes said it was his fault.

It didn't seem polite to ask for further details. But he could not help but wonder.

It was unsettling, how normal and domestic it felt to emerge from a bath and find his flatmate -

no -

his _host_ \- hunched over his microscope.

It flustered John a bit. These moments of double focus. He looked down, and spied on a nearby table a sort of mirror, not quite perfectly round, in a wooden frame carved with incomprehensible, yet somehow friendly-looking symbols. With the completely mundane and foolishly inconsequential idea of checking that he hadn't missed a spot shaving, John picked up the little mirror and looked into it.

It wasn't a mirror, it was a picture of a dog.

It wasn't a picture of a dog, it was a _moving_ picture of a dog.

No, it was - it was a dog that was looking back at him - mirroring the motions of his head and opening its mouth -

"What," said John and, apparently, the dog, at the same time: "what the hell?"

He looked up at Holmes, eyes wide. Holmes had sat back from his microscope and was looking expectantly at John, smirking.

"What is it?"

"It's - there's a dog," John said.

"What sort of dog?"

John looked back down at the mirror, but it wasn't showing a dog anymore. "No, now it's a cat - it's talking when I talk!"

He looked up again, saw Holmes still smiling, waiting for something. This time when he looked back into the mirror he was not surprised that it had changed again. It was a hawk, now, and it snapped its beak shut when John gulped.

"It's - me," he said tentatively - "as - other things? What I would look like if I were - animals?"

"Indeed."

"That's _amazing_ ," said John, and he meant it. He was amazed. Magic. What could magic do, what couldn't it?

"Watson," laughing, "out of all the objects and devices and curiosities I possess, you are amazed by a _child's toy?"_

"It's a bloody _amazing_ child's toy," said John, looking up at him and seeing, with a pleasurable little jolt, that Holmes was wearing an expression of supreme self-satisfaction. The smile playing about his lips said, _I'm really something. I'm glad you noticed_.

"What, did you invent it or something?"

Ha, yes he did. Was that a slight blush? It was.

John looked back down and this time saw the startling and not completely pleasant face of a grasshopper at extreme magnification.

"Guh," said John. Mandibles moved.

"It always starts with dog and cat," said Holmes, "but once it gets warmed up it can become quite random. If you look long enough, eventually you will see yourself as a woman."

He laughed again when John hastily set the mirror down.

"So you invent things? Is that what you do, you're an inventor?"

"I am an inventing magician."

"Okay," said John. "Are toys your speciality, or...?"

Holmes got up from the microscope. "Oh, no. That mirror is not the only toy, but as a project it is a bit more... harmless than I usually undertake."

"You mean you like to make dangerous things."

"Yes, precisely."

"Let's see one," said John, eagerness clear in his voice, and Holmes grinned conspiratorially at him, just exactly the way Sherlock would.

The fact that Holmes actually kept some things under lock and key ought to have been some warning. The things in the locked cabinet were obviously weapons, though it was not at all obvious what many of them did. John simply knew he wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of any of them.

There were sleek rifle-ish things and short pistol-ish things, those were comprehensible, but others were like brass globes with strange protuberances, and some were fitted onto gauntlets, deadly-looking brass tubes and nozzles. John studied these curiously.

"Wrist guns," said Holmes. "Worn as a pair, one hand with lethal ammunition and the other with stun-powder and rock salt. A painful but non-deadly option."

"That's clever," said John.

"Yes. That was Watson's idea," said Holmes. He was looking up at the cabinet. "He offered suggestions for many refinements. I have been... quite lost without him."

John watched his profile, too saddened and horrified and somehow embarrassed to speak. It was like being told you'd done something bad to someone in a dream - their dream. Should one have to apologise for that? _I wasn't there. It wasn't me. I have no idea what happened._

And John realised with a horrible jolt that in his amazement at all these _things_ , he hadn't been thinking at all about Sherlock being alone, or how John was to get home. Was Sherlock - lost without him? But that was impossible, how could he be.

Holmes closed and locked the cabinet, and he showed John where the key was kept. It dangled from a chain which Holmes hung on one horn of the wrenchingly familiar longhorn skull.

"I would very much like a drink," Holmes said, turning his head towards John without meeting his eyes. "Would you?"

"Oh God yes."


	4. Chapter 4

It was obviously a very special bottle of wine. But _how_ special.

"Fancy bottle," John remarked, sitting down in - not-his, but his chair. It was a pale white wine, in a delicate decanter with a jewel set in the stopper. "I mean, I admit, a lot of your things are a bit fancier than I'm used to, but, _this_." He gestured at it; it spoke for itself. John didn't have the least idea how to guess at the carat weight of gems, but he could get his mind around the old-fashioned ways of describing them, and what it looked like was a diamond the size of a chicken's egg.

"The wine is from a lost world, I am told," said Holmes, fetching glasses out and setting them down on the little table, then frowning at the layer of dust on them and taking them away to wash. "One of the last bottles that remained. So rare it is literally priceless... But I received it as payment, for assistance with a problem." He was frowning as he came back.

"You don't look happy about it," John said.

Holmes' eyes flashed up at John, but then he sighed and shook his head. "I am not. The advice I gave was not properly implemented by the client. Lives were wasted. Strategically _valuable_ lives. Foolish. Unnecessary. _Counterproductive_." He set the clean glasses down with a thump. "So I gave a little more advice, for free."

"What do you mean?"

Holmes shook his head again, sighing this time. "It hardly matters. Let us say that I led him to believe he had only one choice, when he had two; and trusted that choice to think of her own way out. To boil it down to an essential, Watson, there were two queens left in the deck, and I forced the clever one on him."

"You cheated your client...?"

"No, my original advice procured him the object he sought. But not to the effect desired, in the end. Not like that. I have _standards_." Darkly, "Even with _angels_."

Um. Well. If magic existed, why _not_ angels.

"You cheated an angel."

"He wasn't a very nice angel."

"Right, think I'll have some of that wine now, thanks," said John.

The wine was _incredibly_ potent. Thanks to its obvious specialness, John took only a small sip at first, and the _flavours_ that blossomed across his tongue - flavours so delicate they were like light refracting - drove every other thought out of his head.

"Oh," he said, or something like it.

Holmes was just lowering his glass, and his face was just slightly flushed and his lips were parted and he looked so _startled_.

"It is splendid," he said slowly. "I was certainly not cheated of payment. I just felt dishonoured by the killing. I was paid for a clever plan, and his henchmen killing that whole family was _not_ clever."

"Besides," snapped John, "there was all the _killing_."

"Ah, yes Watson, that's you is it not, that's you who reminds me of things like that. And when you are not here..."

John said, quickly, before he could stop himself, "How long ago, how long has he been gone," and then took another sip of wine to prevent the need to worry about his expression. Music and sunlight from the dawn of time, that's what the wine tasted of.

"How long," Holmes had another sip from his glass and his colour intensified. "How do you want it, in days? weeks? or hours, or years, or seconds? I know them all. It's been too long."

He reached into his pocket and John assumed he was after the cigarette case - but not this time.

It was a flat leather case, more plain than any object John had seen to belong to him. Holmes handed it to John, and John put down his glass to open it.

It was a photograph - some peculiar old type of photograph, like back when they were made with silver. It was a photograph of John Watson.

It gave him the most peculiar sensation. It made his skin crawl.

Thanks to the recent experience with the mirror, he half expected this to be one: it was his face, after all. Only with a moustache, which was just bizarre.

Unlike the old photographs John had seen before, this one was not a stiffly posed, full body standing shot. (This other Watson wasn't wearing a hat, either, another old-fashioned thing he might have expected.) It was more modern in composition, more of a candid snap, one where the subject knew the picture was being taken, but only just knew. There was a realisation, flash of rueful annoyance, and then a sort of permission given, relaxing into the smile.

John blinked. That was a lot to see in a single picture. It wasn't like a bit of film, like a Harry Potter thing. It was subtle. But there were definitely two distinct moments in it, like lenticular 3-D when you tilted the picture in the light. This picture did that by itself.

"I was attempting to perfect my aspectography camera," said Holmes. "That iteration was technically a failure, but the portrait was a happy artifact of the process. You see how two discrete moments were captured - it almost seems like three, the in between flash lends an illusion of life - - "

He stopped talking: his voice had broken over the word.

John did not know what to say. He kept looking at the picture, waiting for Holmes to compose himself. The word _life_ had sounded a note of anguish that John was afraid to see.

The other John Watson looked up at the camera from where he sat at a desk. There was a pen in his hand, sheets of paper spread out. The picture was in colour, but with a shifty, watercolour sort of look. He wore a white shirt with a collar, opened at the neck; his cuffs were undone and turned up. He was wearing a waistcoat. John never wore them, he thought they made him look like a fucking hobbit. But hobbits didn't have moustaches, did they? Maybe these things balanced each other out. And -

There was a plain gold ring on Watson's left hand.

"He was married?" Startled. John never had been. It looked odder to his eye, once he had noticed it, than the moustache or the waistcoat. Not just a difference in costume, but something more essential. Like Holmes' grey hair, a slight but uncanny difference.

"Yes," said Holmes after a moment, and he sounded calm again, so John closed the folding case and handed it back. Holmes took it, tucked it away, and then did produce the cigarette case after all.

John took up his wine again. He'd scarcely had any yet. Holmes had only poured about a half glass for each, but it seemed like a lot now. Not as though it could be poured back, anyhow.

"And you were _okay_ with that?"

"It was mildly annoying."

"But only mildly?" John thought about Sherlock's histrionics over one lousy date. How had Watson managed Holmes enough to be allowed to, first, spend enough time with a woman that it was conceivable that he might marry her, and second, actually marry her?

"The marriage was acceptable. It was the wedding that was annoying."

John laughed a little, drank more of his wine. He could just imagine Sherlock as a surly, baffled and above all _bored_ best man, who would say many insulting and unintentionally hilarious things during his toast, if he could even be strongarmed into making one, and would have lost the rings by melting them down for an experiment.

But thinking about Sherlock in this way did not stay funny. He was imagining a fictional future situation, and there _was_ no future. Sherlock did not remember John anymore. That way had been closed. John had been deleted for him, by the mysterious mechanism of interaction with London Below.

"Has anyone ever gone back?" he asked. "Isn't there _anything_ I can do?"

"You could stay here with me," said Holmes.

John had just sipped from his glass again when Holmes said this, and the wine slipped down his throat like vapour. He stared wordlessly at Holmes. (He was remembering another day. _Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other_ , and that weird smile. John had only just seen Sherlock's face for the first time then and his eyes were not at all sure what to make of it but even then he'd known the smile was weird and the man was proposing that they live together.)

"You no longer have a home Above, Watson. And nor do I. This London Below is not my world, either, but I am here now. No one you ever knew remembers you. Your mother, your sister. - _He_ has no idea that you ever existed."

John looked down.

"Our pasts diverge, but in the present we are both here." Holmes swirled the remaining wine in his glass. John's eyes followed it. _"I_ can see and remember you."

John opened his mouth, closed it. He looked around, helpless for a reply. In one sense it was just obvious, where else was he to go? But could he just _accept_ that Sherlock - his Sherlock - was lost to him?

_Did Mrs Hudson send you up here? I am not taking any clients at this time._

John drank the rest of his wine. There was a little more than a comfortable swallow left in the glass, and the rush of it was starting to gently spin his head around.

"There can be as many rooms in this house as you wish. Or as few."

"What...?"

"Rooms. For whatever purpose. It is simplicity itself."

John frowned in confusion and for some reason thought fleetingly about Mrs Hudson on that first day. _If you'll be needing two._

Holmes put his cigarette into his mouth and switched his wine glass to the other hand.

And then John saw.

He hadn't noticed it before, how had he not noticed it before? but at first Holmes had been wearing gloves, and now he was in a shirt with sleeves that came down over his hands like a Lord Byron costume, and only now, sitting with his elbow on the arm-rest of his chair, his fingers curled round the glass and the cuff falling back, did John notice the two plain gold bands crowded onto the ring finger of Holmes' left hand.

John was glad he had already swallowed his wine.

One of the rings was a bit too big for the slender finger and was kept from falling off by the other one.

He lifted his eyes from Holmes' hand to his face and endured a thump of mortification inside his chest when he saw that Holmes was watching him and could tell what he was thinking.

"I see by your face," said Holmes slowly, "that things are quite different with you. But I was not - suggesting - " And he looked away.

"I was not _suggesting_ ," he repeated. And he drank down his wine.

John sat back in his chair and closed his eyes and realised he was a little drunk.

He opened them again quickly, because he did not want to just pass out here, now.

"I want to go outside," John said, and pushed at his chair arms to lever himself up. He started towards the side door that must lead out to the garden.

Holmes stayed in his seat. His face was closed, blank, what John thought of as 'pinched' from the inside.

John paused and turned back. "Are you coming?"

Holmes looked up at him in clear surprise and for the first time John felt his heart lurch. Did he expect John to do a runner just like that?

"As you wish," Holmes said, and he bounded eagerly up out of his seat.

They went out into the afternoon garden.

It wasn't really very big. There was no path or much of anywhere to walk but down to the stream. But there was a wrought-iron table and chairs outside, and the breeze in the trees sounded like the ocean. John's senses, heightened by ancient wine, seemed to take it all in like a familiar dream.

They sat down. They were in the same relative positions as they had been indoors, but the change of scene did wonders for John's equilibrium.

There was quiet for a while. Just the waves of wind beating against the trees.

Holmes lit yet another cigarette. The breeze brought some of the smoke right near John's face, but he still couldn't smell anything. He'd given up wondering how that worked. He was just grateful for it. But now a question, a completely inappropriate question crossed John's mind. Did his mouth taste like tobacco, or didn't it?

Not that that made, or should make, any difference whatsoever to John. He was only curious. When one met girls in bars they tended more often than not to smoke and a smoky kiss wasn't really -

And why the hell was he even thinking about that.

"What were we talking about," said Holmes languidly, after a while.

It wasn't as though he didn't remember. He was trying to let John set the subject and avoid whatever embarrassed him. John could see that as clearly as though it were written on the air.

"You mentioned a wedding," he said, refusing to take the offered change of subject... feeling it out. "You meant _your_ wedding. You said it was annoying."

"It was an appalling waste of time," said Holmes, words coming in a rush as though he were relieved to be able to talk about it. "It didn't change anything. We might just as well have put rings on and left it at that."

Fussy, petulant, and not even honest. John had to smile. It was a familiar combination, Sherlock's most childish moments were when he pretended not to like something that he liked. That was when he was at his most twelve.

"It must have been awful," he said commiseratingly, then laughed at the look on Holmes' face. But after a moment, Holmes made his cigarette disappear and leaned back, expelling the smoke.

"Not awful," he said quietly, his eyes closed, his hands pressed together, so familiar. Except for the rings. "He was pleased with me. He said so. That was worth something."

And they were quiet again.

John tried to fix his thoughts on it and his thoughts kept shying away in bewilderment. Married. This other John Watson, this other Sherlock Holmes. Together. Really together, _together_ -together. Given the rings, _openly_ together.

_It didn't change anything._

And now one of them was gone, and the other was left wearing both rings.

The other Watson might have been dead, but at least he wasn't forgotten.

"Can you tell me what happened?" he said at last. "I feel bad to ask but..."

"But you need to know," said Holmes.

"Yeah."

Holmes sighed, opened his eyes, and looked over at John.

"A bit more wine, I should think," he said, "we can drink it out here," and he clearly expected John to go get it.

John did go and get it, but only because he wanted some too.

He brought out the bottle and the glasses and this time John poured. A little less this time for each, but still - the wine was delicious, and the talk at hand was already difficult enough. The breeze was clearing his head, maybe even a bit too well.

So he took a good deep swallow - which was for the best, because Holmes seemed to interpret the prompt _what happened_ as not just referring to Watson's death but also - the rest of it. Which John wasn't even asking about!

Holmes lowered his own glass, set it down and stretched his hand out in front of him so that John could see. "This ring I've worn for five years," he said, touching the one that fit, the one closer to his knuckle. "And this one..." He touched the other one, the slightly bigger one trapped closer in. John looked at it and knew he'd seen that one in the picture.

Holmes said, "You asked me before - how long he has been gone. I have been evasive of many of your questions. Three years I have worn this one. It galls me every day to see it, to feel it there. I should not be wearing it. It is his."

"Evasive...?" Had he? It had just seemed like a way of speaking, but... Yes. Holmes had not answered directly, and had diverted John by handing over the picture. Holmes said 'many', though. How many...?

"I am not sure even now how much I should say." Holmes tried to press his palms together, but quickly gave it up in search of his wine glass. "He was the one who wanted - _he_ had these rings made - yet he never gave any hint of it in all of his books about our adventures. I looked - I checked. He never said."

The sun was starting to go down.

"He left a letter for me to read - he hid it so well. But he knew I'd find it." He took the photograph case out again, and this time opened it another way, producing a folded square of paper.

John looked at it with a sensation tearing through him that it took him moments to realise was panic, not a heart attack. He watched Holmes unfolding it and he said, his mouth dry, "I'd rather not - "

"Then you can go back inside while I read it," Holmes snapped. "I shall _tell_ you what happened, but chronologically he wrote this _first_."

John didn't go back inside.

The letter was two small pages, handwritten - John could see the strokes of a bold pen. He didn't recognise his own writing there, but he couldn't see it straight on, and he never wrote letters like that, with pens like that. He _typed_. It gave him distance and control.

_If you have found this too soon you will know it. Put it back._

_If you are really not sure if it is too soon, ask me._

_If you cannot ask me because we are fighting, it's too soon, put it back._

_If you cannot ask me because I am not there to ask, then this is the right time._

(John felt a wry little smile form unwillingly on his face at 'fighting' and 'put it back'. It quickly went away.)

_There is something I have always needed to say to you._

_I am sorry._

_I am sorry for all of the precious time that I wasted. So much of it. Years of time, wasted, turning my face away from what was, in the end, so completely simple._

_In truth I can no longer remember clearly what it was I was afraid of. Half a riddle is meaningless. Like Alice's raven and the writing-desk. You need both a question and an answer._

_It may be you do not care about this. It may be you don't mind at all. It seems to me very possible that you do not even know what I mean. But I do. I can only repeat that I regret the time lost. It took so little time to fall in love with you, and so much time to admit it._

_When we met I was like an egg with a cracked shell. An egg is a prison to a bird that cannot hatch. You smashed me open and let me out._

_I am only sorry that it took so long, that you were always having to wait for me with my slow and damaged gait, because however long I may live there is not enough time for you and me._

There was a silence. John was not sure if Holmes had reached the end of the letter, or just didn't want to continue. John was fleetingly curious about the signature. Was that like his? But he didn't want to look at the letter, and Holmes didn't offer it. He sat looking at it.

"So tell me, John Watson," said Holmes after a while. "Perhaps you understand it. Why was he always sorry for the things he could not help? Why did he think that a wound that gave him pain and slowed his steps was something he had to apologise for? And this." Shaking the letter. "He was right. I do not understand. _Is_ it a riddle? A code? If you break an egg too soon it is just an egg and it never becomes a bird!"

"I didn't write that letter," John said flatly, but his heart was hammering because - he - almost - could have. "I can't help you with it."

Quite honestly, he thought that at least in the letter, the other Watson had been speaking metaphorically about his 'slow and damaged gait', but he did not say so.

_You smashed me open and let me out._ John didn't write those words, but they resonated in him, oh yes, yes he knew _just_ what that meant, that was what it was like, that was what being with Sherlock was like.

Had been like.

"It's like a conversation I shouldn't be overhearing," John said.

Holmes looked up at him. Misery was dragging at his features.

John said gently, "Drink up, then, and just get it over with. Tell me what happened."

With his glass drained and set aside, Holmes stuck his long legs out in front of him and leaned back in the chair, lighting a new cigarette. John didn't really begrudge him this one at all. He'd never been a smoker but he could appreciate the benefit of having something to do with one's hands, something to look at that wasn't the other person.

Holmes sighed. "How do I tell this? The folly of it beggars belief. I was so irresponsible. He always chided me for that... He worried at me about it. He fidgeted me beyond enduring. I was going to get myself killed, he said; I was always running ahead into danger - and though he could fight better than anyone I had ever seen, he could not _run_. There was a bullet in his leg. The army surgeons had said it could not be removed. He lived with it and it gave him pain and he could not run and he wanted that so much."

John had long since had a bad feeling about where this was headed. He already knew the story would end in a death, but - still.

"You - tried to do something about it," he guessed.

"Yes."

"Without asking him."

Silence.

"Well?" snapped John. He was tired of waiting.

"I wanted it to be a surprise," said Holmes, and his voice sounded weirdly, awfully young, and he looked bewildered by a trauma he himself had caused, like a child with matches in his hand bleakly watching his house burn down. "And it was best to do the procedure while he was sleeping. So..."

"Sweet Jesus," said John.

"I _tested_ it first. Several times! With mammals. I would not have _experimented_ on him. I knew - I thought I knew what I was doing." He hunched his shoulders. "But when I tested the procedure I was in an _ordered_ space without interfering fields or interreactive objects or... explosive things... and when I tried it on him... he was in there, on the sofa."

John closed his eyes. He felt a shudder go over him and was very glad he had not been the one to sleep on that sofa the night before.

"The bullet was rendered incorporeal," Holmes went on, "that was what was supposed to happen. But something in the room - reacted. Interreacted. I never saw what. It happened so quickly. I - don't - think he ever woke up.

"Things had exploded. Glass was everywhere. And he was... _gone_... His clothes, his ring, the _bullet_ \- ! all those things were left, but John - had been - essentially - vapourised - and - " He was curling up like a dying insect. The cigarette dangled forgotten between his fingers. "he - wasn't - "

"All right," said John, breathing hard. "Stop now."


	5. Chapter 5

Too many things to feel. They were churning in his stomach with too much rare wine.

Fury. _You fucking idiot. Surprise my arse. You had to know he'd never say yes._

Guilt. Because John's bullet had been to the shoulder, and his limp had been caused by a different sort of damage. And his Sherlock actually _had_ healed him. _Had_ freed John to run beside (if still slightly behind) him.

Fear. Because, precisely because the motivation had been good, even loving, it was _monstrous._

Pity. For the same reason.

Longing. For home. For normal life.

For Sherlock.

Holmes said, "I must apologise. I should have told you this before asking if you wished to stay."

"Yeah," said John, "but I hadn't answered yet anyway."

There was still wine left in the bottle, but John had lost all desire for it. He stood up. "I need to walk a bit."

Holmes did not try to follow, but he called out softly as John went down towards the trees, "I will await you indoors."

John lifted a hand to show he had heard, and then strode on toward the sound of running water at the back end of the garden.

It was a tiny brook, hardly even worth the name. A trickle of water through trees. But it marked out a sort of boundary. On the other side the trees were thicker.

Standing on the other side of the little brook, staring at him, was the girl.

John sighed. "What now?" She was not a reflection, and not running away, but somehow she still seemed distant.

"I have a message," she said, in a perfectly normal voice.

"What?" But he'd heard. He just didn't understand. "Who from?"

"From _'whom'_ ," she corrected him with some asperity. "From me."

"Okay," said John. "What's the message?"

"He doesn't look good," she said, and then looked at him expectantly.

"What?"

"Are all old people deaf? _He doesn't look good."_

"Who doesn't?"

"Your one," she said. "The one Above."

This time, she seemed satisfied by the expression on John's face, and turned to go.

"Wait," said John. "Wait! Please come back. What do you mean? You've seen him? What do you mean he doesn't look good? _How_ doesn't he?"

But she hurried away, glancing furtively up the garden, towards the lit windows of the house. It was getting dark and her white dress seemed to float like a ghost through the trees, among the awakening fireflies.

John went to follow her, but the trickle of water really was a barrier, and he couldn't cross it. He tried several times, increasingly frustrated with the knowledge that it was futile, before turning back to walk up the hill in the deepening dusk.

"How do I get back up to - Above?" he demanded, when he came in, and Holmes looked at John over the violin which he had just lifted up to his shoulder, eyebrows lifted. He had regained some of his composure while John was outside, but John had lost all of his own.

"Watson - was it not clear, you cannot just go back - "

John, pacing toward the door, whirled on him.

"I can _go_ back there, can't I, even if no one can see me? _How_ do I go back? Some people can come and go! How do I! It's important!"

"Watson, that little girl is a _special case._ For one thing - "

John felt the world stop cold.

_"Wait."_

Stared at him.

"When did I... _ever_... mention a girl...?"

He _hadn't._ Holmes had, so he said, deduced the route John had taken Below by observation. John had not told the story of how he got there. Holmes hadn't asked and there was so much else to -

_Didn't ask, because he already knew._

John felt the blood draining out of his face as he stared at Holmes. Stared aghast into those eyes that were so dearly familiar, and so utterly alien.

 _"You_ sent her," he said, fists clenched, rage surging up inside him like pressurised steam. _"You_ did this!"

Holmes did not reply, but straightened his shoulders and lifted his chin, lowering the violin to dangle by his side, like the bow in the other hand.

John punched him in the face. Holmes did nothing to evade it - just stood there and took it.

"You bastard," panted John, his hand smarting from that sharp cheekbone. "You complete fucking bastard, you stole my life!"

"What life! _You two_ were not _together! You_ didn't have anyone! You didn't have to lose anyone! _He's_ alive and doesn't even miss -"

"So you bring me down here to _replace_ yours - "

"NO, not that - I was _not_ suggesting - I _said_ I wasn't - "

"Oh no of _course_ not, 'as many rooms or as _few'_ \- that's what you wanted, to replace the one that you _blew up trying to fix - "_

"Don't you dare to TAUNT me - "

Holmes was white-faced and wild-eyed himself, now, with a red mark on his cheek from John's fist. His hand trembled where it clutched the violin neck. The rings glinted in the firelight.

"You don't know," said Holmes, "you have no idea. You have no _idea_ what I have lost. _My_ poor John, apologising to me in his farewell letter for _wasting time_ \- What have _you_ ever done but waste yours? And you'll never stop. That's why I chose _you,_ out of all the John Watsons in all the worlds I could reach."

(John had not considered until this moment the idea that there were more than two Holmeses, more than two Watsons. It had never even crossed his mind at all. But - but of course. If more than one, then... why _not_ more than one and one? When mirrors faced each other, the reflections went on infinitely.)

"What you lost, _you lost!"_ John shouted. "You cocked it up, mate! _You killed him_ \- you don't get to have a do-over by stealing from yourself - "

"How, how is it stealing - " Holmes actually stammered. His eyes were wide and wet.

"It is, you're stealing me from him, and you're stealing him from me."

It hit the room with the ring of truth.

Holmes shook his head as though trying to negate it anyway. "But you're not even lovers - "

"No. That doesn't _matter_. It _doesn't change anything."_

Another ring of truth.

They stared at one another.

"Help me go home," said John.

"No, I can't," said Holmes. But he already looked defeated.

"I bet you know how to send me back. There's got to be _something_ in your - curiosity shop. Let me go."

"No, please - "

"NO, NOW IS TOO LATE FOR 'PLEASE'," John bellowed. "NOW IS THE TIME FOR 'SORRY' AND FOR MAKING THINGS RIGHT - "

There was a banging on the door.

Not the garden door; the front door. The door that was, on its other side, the cabin door of the decrepit boat on the inky-dark underground canal.

John and Holmes, both startled out of their own particular difficult moment, looked to the door, then at one another.

Banging again, very loud. It might have shaken the foundation of the house, if the side of the door being knocked on were actually attached to the house. But it was strident knocking, and there was more than one fist, from the sound of it.

It did _not_ sound like the arrival of friends.

Holmes was only just saying with assurance that "no one could get through the door, _except_ \- " when it burst open, and clearly whatever the exception was had been in the front.

There were armoured men - the ones whose female friend John had accidentally offended - their numbers greatly increased since then - and a sleek dark thing with a stinger bobbing behind it. John felt the back of his hand itch involuntarily at the sight of it.

"Well, shit," John said.

Lots of things happened then. John wished for his own gun (not for the last time) but made a sort of jumping dive for the key on the chain dangling from one horn of the longhorn skull.

Holmes lifted his violin and his bow, and made nonstandard use of them as impromptu weapons. They did impressive damage for a few blows, but wouldn't be making music anymore.

Then Holmes dived behind the sofa, and produced a crossbow seemingly from nowhere.

John managed to wrench open the weapons cabinet as the scorpion-like thing swarmed over the chair towards him. A shot was fired at it - Holmes' crossbow - but it bounced off the thing's carapace and ricocheted.   
  
"Don't!" shouted John, though it was long since too late by then. The crossbow bolt crashed through an orrery, which teetered and then fell through the shelf below, smashing precious crystals and grinding them into powder.

John grabbed at random for one of the most gun-like weapons in the cabinet and turned it on the scorpion thing, but before he could fire it he had to duck an axe whirling at his head. He lifted the gun, aimed -

"John," shouted Holmes, "not that one!"

"What?" But rather than argue he threw it down and grabbed up another. He fell back on his arse in front of the cabinet, but had the gun in front of him, in his hands, foreign yet familiar enough, still a gun.

He still wished for his own as he fired once, twice, then deflected the sting with the door of the cabinet. But that _was_ the last time.

The scorpion thing was dead. Three of the armoured men, also. The rest scattered, back out the door, which Holmes barricaded, though a return visit didn't seem likely now.

John stood looking down at the stinging thing. "I thought I killed it," he said. "Before I met you." He gestured at his own hand and the half-healed scratch.

"That will have been its spouse, I think," said Holmes distantly. "They mate for life."

Well, that - felt terrible. John stood and kept looking at it for a while, though it was horrible, in an effort at respect.

Holmes walked around in the rubble between the main windows, his boots crunching in glass, dislodging bits of metal and sending tiny gears spinning and rolling. He stooped to pick something up.

It was the off-round crystal with the faint blue light in it. Holmes looked down at it in the palm of his hand and sighed, then set it down on a table well clear of the carnage.

"I will send you home," he said, looking up at John. "Alice can take you home."

"Alice?" said John.

"The little girl. She does have a name, you know," and Holmes seemed like himself again.

"Right," said John. "Alice."

He felt as though he were missing something, but he just didn't care.

He was going home.

It was awkward, when they parted. Holmes' eyes only lifted up to John's eyes once, and it was a painful moment, all that loneliness and guilt that Holmes could no longer help but let him see. The little girl - Alice - had come from the garden and stood waiting by the door, fidgeting. Her face and hands were cleaner, but she still wore the same torn white dress.

"We won't meet again," said Holmes. "You will be able to return with her, but if you should enter into London Below again, it will keep you."

"I understand," said John, even though it didn't make any sense to him.

"I would have liked to give you some parting gift," Holmes said, "but magic things generally become useless Above, and... well. My supply of such things has been somewhat too diminished to willingly turn any of them into a commemorative paperweight."

"That's okay," John said. "I, er. Never thanked you for saving my life. The antidote."

"You are welcome," said Sherlock Holmes.

Alice said, "Can we go now?"

"In a moment," Holmes said to her. "Pray wait outside and he'll be right with you."

She went out through the door - the kicked-down door, through which the deck of the boat could be seen, and sat down, drumming her bare heels against a coil of rope.

Holmes turned towards John and for just an instant John dreaded that he might want to _touch_ John and John just didn't think he could cope - But he did not. He only stepped close enough to speak quietly, too quietly for the ears of the little girl outside the door.

"I will give you one thing you can take back with you," he said, "a piece of advice, which will be useful to you no matter what you may come to feel, or not feel, in regards to any version of me in the entirety of the multiple-universe. If time travel were possible, if I could page back to the early part of our story, it is what I would tell _him._

"It is this: We wait for you to take the lead in matters of the heart. We say nothing until you say. We know that in matters of emotion, even when you are being stupid, you are smarter than us. So if you wish nothing to happen, you need only do nothing. And if you wish something to happen, you need only do something." He shrugged. "It is very simple."

John snorted, but very quietly. Simple.

"Thank you," he said, and then he muttered, "Sorry."

_Sorry it didn't work out. Sorry I said you killed your husband._

They sort of nodded to each other, and then John went out through the broken door, and the little girl took his hand.

He had been half conscious, delirious with venom when he came this way before. He had no concept of how far there was to go. She held his hand the whole time - he did not question this. She was not the sort of child who needed the reassurance. He had a feeling that it was part of taking him properly home.

When she finally let go of John's hand, they were standing at the edge of a sort of well. She nodded at it.

"That's the way," she said.

"Are you kidding me...?"

"I'd take a deep breath if I were you. Good-bye, and good luck."

"What?"

She gave him a shove.

***

He fell for only a few seconds. Then he was underwater. Shocked bubbles rose from his mouth as he thrashed - then he broke the surface, gasping and spluttering.

He looked around wildly, treading water. His heavy wet clothes dragged at him.

He was in the Regent's Canal.

And he wasn't invisible anymore. People on the towpath were pointing and calling out. Ducks scattered, complaining.

"M'all right," he called weakly, to forestall any attempts at rescue. He swam, half dazed, to one of the old horse ramps, and crawled laboriously out. A cyclist stopped to take a picture.

He had money in his wallet, but no taxi was willing to stop for the filthy soaking-wet man with wild eyes, so John had to walk home - as he had always intended to do, though some exhausting things had happened to him in the meantime, and it seemed to take forever. 

People noticed him. People commented on how wet he was. Some derisively, some with sympathy. He was shivering a bit. But he did not answer anyone who spoke to him. He could not let his eyes rest until they rested again on one particular face. He could not relax until he was home again, _verifiably_ home. Known. Remembered. He felt like George Bailey running home from the bridge: already in possession of evidence that the world was normal again, but still needing to run home to see his wife's face.

He banged through 221's downstairs door in time to see Mrs Hudson, about to close her own door, but pausing in amazement at the sight of him. "John! What's happened, why are you all - ?"

"Sorry Mrs Hudson," running up the steps past her, and she craned her head to watch him go, looking befuddled but smiling fondly and it was good, so good to see and be seen by her. _Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls._

John burst through the door to B and stood there panting, heart thundering with anticipation and terror, not to mention running all the damn way here from the bloody canal.

There were books _everywhere._ Mountains of books on every surface; not one book left on the shelves. Books stacked on top of the laptops. Books shoved against the microscope. Books in the chairs, the sofa, the sink.

"Sherlock...?"

There was no answer. His heart, still pounding, began to plummet. What difference did it make if the entire rest of the world could see and speak to him, if Sherlock did not?

"SHERLOCK," he bellowed.

There was a sort of shuffling sound. From upstairs? In John's room?

More stairs. Well, it was the last set. He went up and found Sherlock sitting on his bed, hugging his knees, looking dazed.

Yes, he could see what Alice had meant. Sherlock didn't look good. His pallor and nervous hands and eyes were worrying enough, but also he was rocking back and forth slightly, not a reassuring sign in anyone. And he looked scruffy in a way so foreign it took a moment to understand: he hadn't shaved.

Had he taken something?

How long had John been gone? As far as he knew, only one full night had passed. And if he had never existed, he couldn't have been gone. But he existed again now.

"Sherlock?"

It took an agonisingly eternal moment before Sherlock's eyes focussed and he looked up at John.

John braced himself for the icy stranger-Sherlock. _Did Mrs Hudson send -_

"John?"

It was at that moment that John remembered grouching, way back before he got lost, that this was not paradise; and he had to laugh at himself now, because it so obviously was. His world.

And then he remembered how he had left it without a look back, and he didn't want to laugh anymore.

"Are you okay?" John came into the room, approached the bed, hesitated, then touched Sherlock on the shoulder, looking into his face. Pupils seemed all right. It was just the unaccustomed unkemptness that made Sherlock look so messed up. "Why are you up here?"

"Something happened," said Sherlock, slowly. "I didn't... know where you were. I tried... tried stacking the books. But I couldn't remember why...? I came up here... Your things were here but... I couldn't..."

He sounded lost. Young. Scared. This vagueness was not like him and he knew it himself.

John did not know how this worked, but could not imagine Sherlock being able to reconcile - _magic._ John had seen it, but he wanted to protect Sherlock from this, not try to drag it back with him like some sordid dream. So he said,

"I got lost. My phone fell in the canal. And then _I_ did." He laughed a little. "I had a hell of a time getting home. But I'm back now. I won't leave like that again. Sorry if you were worried." He gave Sherlock's shoulder a little squeeze before letting go.

Nothing drastic. Just an experimental touch. Reassurance. Affection.

Sherlock blinked, then smiled at him.

***

Holmes sat at the table and stared out at the moon.

He had barricaded his front door, then used his subtle scissors to permanently cut the way between it and the boat. It had been damaged in the attack, and was in the midst of sinking. He wouldn't need to go that way anymore.

He wished he could play his violin. Such sad songs he could play to the moon now! but the violin and the bow had both been destroyed in the melee, and the implements he might have used to restore them lay likewise smashed amongst the glass shards and burst works. All of the weapons were intact, but the delicate things, the useful things, the things John had valued, all were in ruin.

He thought of the song he would be playing, something beautiful and sad, and his hand tapped the time on the thing it rested on. The rings on his finger clinked, _tink, tink, tink_ against the glass -

_Crack._

Holmes sucked in his breath and froze, gazing down in dismay at the hairline fracture that spread out under his ring finger. One of the few beautiful things left, and he had carelessly broken it. It had been like a beautiful egg with a living light inside, and now tendrils of the light were seeping out at the crack like smoke, reaching to touch his fingertips. If only he could heal the crack and keep it in, keep it from escaping.

But it was already trying to push its way out, like a baby bird struggling to hatch -

And then he _gasped_ , in dazzling realisation.

Heart pounding, Holmes leaped up and, lifting up the shining egg, smashed it down against the table with all his might.

He smashed open the egg, and let John Watson out.

**Author's Note:**

> Heartfelt thanks to ThatsNumberwang for beta reading! And deepest gratitude to BettySwallocks for correcting my enthusiastic ignorance about the Regent's Canal and Camden. I have made corrections to the story based on her kind advice.
> 
> Wikipedia has a [photograph of Alice](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alice_Liddell_2.jpg), taken by the stammering man. 
> 
> I only know the Regent's Canal towpath from cyclists' YouTube videos. But I had to use it, because I saw a photo of the Islington tunnel where the reflection was, as in the story, incredibly like a hole in the ground. It just looked so obvious as a way into London Below. 
> 
> ["The Riddle"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgNewls-uh4) is a Nik Kershaw song from 1984 that I've always liked. "Near a tree by a river, there's a hole in the ground." Kershaw says the song doesn't mean anything at all, (actually he said 'nonsense, rubbish, bollocks, the confused ramblings of an 80's popstar') but this is what it turned into for me. Note also the lines "his mind is a beacon in the veil of the night," and my favorite, "A blackbird sings on bluebird hill."
> 
> If I pulled out all the little jokes and references to things I like that are in here, the rest of it would all fall down in a Jenga pile!


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